On Wednesday morning July 25th, 2018, he walked out of Richland Correctional Institution, RiCI, to never go back in.

Wearing simple sweatpants and a white T-shirt with a coffee stain, his belongings in two net bags, he made his way towards me where I had waited in my car on the visitor parking lot. He looked strong in some sense, with a good tan, steady pace, ready for a new life, ready to stay out.

Let’s call him Sam, my Big Hanna friend walking towards freedom. In 2012, then at Noble Correctional Institution, NCI, Sam became responsible for running the first Big Hanna in-vessel composting operation in the United States, as a Trustee Inmate. The work by Sam, his supervisors and his fellow inmates was so successful that the two Big Hanna T240 at NCI led the way to a roll-out of six Big Hanna T480 and two Big Hanna T60 at Correctional Institutions and Juvenile Facilities in Ohio. These ten composting machines, mostly combined with pulpers, keep close to 3 600 tons of food waste out of landfills every year in Ohio.

As Sam got transferred to RiCI, he showed also there how to obtain a great in-vessel composting process, this time in a Big Hanna T480. The work with composting, with soils and with gardening, based on the support he once got from a very special supervisor at NCI, made life endurable inside the fence, at times even really good. There was a purpose.

As Sam now starts his new life with a few weeks at a halfway house in Akron, awaiting return to his family in Alabama, recycling, composting and gardening will be central in his life. While his action resulting in incarceration took many years away from Sam, he knows it also gave him something in return.

Every time I saw Sam during my visits to NCI or RiCI, Sam would ask: “Where is my Mocha and my Croissant?”

As we drove from RiCI to Akron on this special Wednesday, we stopped at Starbucks in Ashland. Sitting across from each other at a simple table, Sam finally got his Mocha and his Croissant and I was the happiest guy in the world sharing the moment with him.

América Free Zone (www.americafreezone.com) is a free business development area in the province of Heredia, located in the heart of the San Jose Metropolitan Area of ​​Costa Rica. Despite having extensive experience in providing services to the companies that are located in it, it has state-of-the-art facilities, impeccably endowed with any cutting-edge technology to achieve full excellence in its services.

AFZ is home to the most important technology companies present in the country, such as Dell, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Bosch, Bayer, CGM, Baxter and DHL. In total more than 11 000 people work in the AFZ area and the vast majority of them eat their daily lunch at the Food Court at AFZ. The Food Court have a vast gastronomic offer which includes healthy fast food, executive and Costa Rican typical dishes, homemade like food, cafeterias, natural shakes and smoothies, pastry and sweets.

The restaurants generates large amounts of organic waste that now can be converted into compost with the Big Hanna technology provided by Wastech Costa Rica and BERCA GROUP.

AFZ has created the first milestone of what will be an ambitious organic waste treatment project, changing the current management model through landfill by a more sustainable system, in the proposed goal of maintaining and improving its ” Carbon Neutral “.

That first step consists of the installation of the first Big Hanna composting machine, a T120_40LS model equipped with an internal shredder that allows the treatment of up to 70 kilos per day of organic waste.

This first phase will be followed by four more to achieve the total treatment capacity required by AFZ and in this way provide a sustainable outlet for all the organic waste generated, eliminating its transfer and landfill, which will avoid a considerable expense of natural resources and emission of greenhouse gases, a crucial strategy to achieve carbon neutrality.